


Miles and the Hundred Acre Wood

by missmollyetc



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-11
Updated: 2010-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:29:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/pseuds/missmollyetc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An architect's dream is a dreamer's reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miles and the Hundred Acre Wood

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The characters are all Christopher Nolan's.
> 
> Author's Note: I love Michael Caine, but I was never entirely certain how he became Marion Cotillard's father. Dueling accents over dinner! Imagine the comedy.

He writes a grant; nothing revolutionary to it, but interesting nonetheless, and necessary. The buildings he wants to look at are in far-flung places, out of the way and brilliant in their isolation. If he wants them, he has to get to them before one of his more senior colleagues decides he needs to go on sabbatical, and that Miles can take over teaching his course load. The department, of course, can't stretch its budget to pay for more than half his travel and research needs, and a federal match of cost would more than make up for the time spent away from home. He's studying American architecture after all; the least the government can do is help him preserve it.

Eleven months and two rewrites later, his grant is denied. Miles barely notices; his little girl hasn't slept through the night since they brought her home from the hospital. He rocks Mallorie in his arms while Antoinette sleeps, and whispers everything he knows about the Golden Ratio to her; his singing would only make her cry. Her little hands open and close on his chest.

 

***

 

Miles has ample opportunity to study the man who sits in the back of Miles' classroom, his hands crossed neatly in front of him on the desk; dark hair, dark eyes, thin lips, and a long nose. His suits are worth more than Mallorie's college fund—which she wouldn't need, if she weren't hell bent on going to a college in France her parents didn't teach at—and he's old enough to be Miles'…younger brother, which means he's certainly not a returning student, but he's quiet and attentive, and so Miles lets him be. If he wants to learn about architecture from a man who's never built a thing outside his own head, then so be it. He's not the first.

A week later, Miles is putting his lecture notes on Norburg-Schulz into his case when a rumpled packet thumps down onto his desk. He looks up quickly, surprised into raising his hands in front of his chest, and the quiet suit from the back of the room is standing in front of him. The suit smiles, a slight thinning of his already slim lips into an upward curve, and the perspective doesn't flatter him at all. Up close, he is a collection of angles, like rebar strung together to resemble the frame of a man without thought for the elegance of its function.

The suit gestures to packet on Miles' desk with a quick jab of his fingers. "Dr. Ellison?" he inquires, in barely accented English. "I believe this is your's."

Miles glances at the packet, and blinks. The title on the first page is "Phenomenology and American Architecture: Form as Function in the Land of Manifest Destiny."

"That's my grant proposal," Miles says, slowly. "Where did you find this?"

He looks up, and the suit hasn't changed expression.

"My assistant did, actually," the suit says, "in the back of a very cold records archive. I'm afraid the Office of Management and Budget doesn't treat its discards very well at all."

Miles presses his fingers into his shoulders, and then puts his hands down. They hang, heavy, at his sides. "Ah," he says, for lack of anything else to say.

The suit raises his thick eyebrows, and that thin, curved line inches upwards. Miles shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and picks up the nearest stack of his students' homework from his desk. There's something wrong here; he can feel it in the way his hands shake the papers together.

"Well," he says, tapping the bottom edge of the stack against his desk meaningfully, "this has been interesting, Mr. …"

"Sawicki," The suit says, "and aren't you a little bit curious why I'm here?"

"I assumed you were auditing," Miles says, licking his lips. "Was I wrong?"

"Not entirely," Mr. Sawicki says, "but I was wondering. None of your other grant proposals bring up phenomenology again. Why is that?"

Miles puts the now-collected pile of his students' papers back on the desk, aligning the left side to the edges of his old grant proposal. "I wanted to stay closer to home," he says. "Plenty of architecture in Boston."

It's mostly correct, and there was even DC when Antoinette was researching Adams, and he was having his brief flirtation with the federal period. The truth, however, was that there were other grants, other research, but there is only one Mallorie. Apart from trips to visit Antoinette's parents in Bordeaux, they haven't been out of the country in decades.

"But you're still interested in the topic?" Mr. Sawicki asks, and for the first time Miles sees the man spark to life, eyes opening wide beneath pale lids, thickly lashed. "Your speech today on the sensory properties of function was—" Sawicki licks his lips. His flat, dark eyes gleam a little too sharply for Miles' taste. "It was inspiring."

"Well, that's always nice to hear," Miles says, taking a measured step backwards.

He's had more than enough of Sawicki's accumulated strangeness, and his carefully maintained self. A sneaking suspicion, no doubt brought about from Antoinette's love of James Bond movies, is growing the in the back of his head. He glances up the stairway at the door, but for once the hallways are remarkably free of noise and students. Miles feels the back of his throat tighten.

"Mr. Ellison," Sawicki says, catching his attention again. "Do you have a moment to listen to a proposition?"

 

***

 

He's told they began with video game developers. It didn't work. Minds attuned to fluidity couldn't produce reliable stability, and their subconscious—these projections Sawicki talks about—played havoc with the dreamscape. The _dreamscape._ Miles feels… He's staring up at a sky no one has ever seen, while surrounded by tourists—projections, dreams of _tourists_ for God's sake—step around him as if it were another day in the violet-skied neighborhood. Cobblestones pop into creation underneath his feet, and Miles feels…humbled.

"Why…" he clears his throat, and the stars swirl. "Why me?" he asks.

"Because of your grant," Sawicki says. "The sensory properties of building. According to my scientists, one must understand the feeling of solidity in order to recreate it. Also, you've got me in the wrong uniform."

Miles can't help it. He looks over, mouth already open to call bullshit, and sees Sawicki standing, balancing on the curb which Miles is, apparently, dreaming. Sawicki spreads his raw-boned hands to the sky which he says Miles has created out of memories, possibly of sunsets.

"The army? Really?" he asks. "I'm not even American."

"I…"

Sawicki rubs his left hand over his head, and the uniform he's wearing melts away to reveal the suit he was wearing in Miles' classroom before they…how had they gotten here again?

Miles feels something like a cold breeze curl over the back of his neck. Several tourists freeze in place, cameras aimed at the giant, tacky windmill of the Moulin Rouge and he is in _Boston_ and yet this is the Paris of his own youth, but a café? Near Pigalle?

"It was nineteen sixty-eight," Sawicki says, and the dream-tourists, these projections, take their pictures and move on, "and you wrote a grant comparing the creation of a building to the imposition of the subconscious onto the real world, the architect as the constructor, maintainer, and developer of a reality imposed upon those who entered the structure built."

"It was just an idea," Miles says. "I never got the chance to think it through."

Miles stutters over that last word, because it's a lie. He's thought about it. He's thought about buildings the way other men think about their mistresses; the shape of them, the feel of stone and steel, and the correct mixture of concrete. Cement vs. brick. The meaning of a spiral staircase in an open-planned room.

"I don't believe you," Sawicki says, and Miles realizes a staircase is swirling to life in front of him, cobblestones lifting up from the street and wrought-iron café chairs twisting up into a railing.

Sawicki clicks his heels together, drawing Miles' attention again. Over his shoulder, Miles sees a pair of school children sitting at a café look up from their bowls of ice cream. Something ugly wavers over their narrow faces as Sawicki steps into the road. He puts his hands in his pockets as he nears Miles. Above them, an air raid siren begins to wail, and Miles looks up and up and _up—_

He breathes in sharply, and tastes something medicinal on the back of his tongue. He is lying on a chaise lounge, his legs covered in a blanket, and an anonymous nurse is removing a needle from his arm. Her thumb presses into the bend of his elbow, fingers curling around.

She's dull, with mousy brown hair and tortoise-shell barrettes. Miles looks beyond her to see Sawicki lying on his own chaise lounge like a sack of hangers wrapped in a good suit. He's got his hands tucked behind his head. He's smiling.

 

***

 

The university doesn't raise a murmur of protest when Miles quits in the middle of the spring semester. Sawicki's company, working on an outsourced DoD contract, is in France. Antoinette is overjoyed. On the plane ride over, Mallorie curls up against his shoulder, exhausted by the move and her own excitement. Miles presses his thumb against the inside of his right elbow, and dreams, staring out at the sky.


End file.
